Presidential candidate Marco Rubio responded sternly Tuesday to President Obama’s latest overture to close the Guantanamo Bay prison facility.
“[W]e’re not going to close Guantanamo. In fact, we shouldn’t be releasing the people that are there now,” Rubio said at a campaign event in Las Vegas. “They are enemy combatants. These are literally enemy combatants, in essence soldiers — not soldiers, terrorists, of foreign terrorist organizations, many of whom, as soon as you release them, they rejoin the fight against us.
“Not only are we not going to close Guantanamo,” Rubio continued. “When I am president, if we capture a terrorist alive, they’re not getting a court hearing in Manhattan. They’re not going to be sent to Nevada. They’re going to Guantanamo, and we’re going to find out everything they know.”
Obama vowed to shut Guantanamo during his first presidential campaign, and he said Tuesday morning he will “continue to make the case for doing so” until his current term expires. He outlined a proposal, drafted at the request of Congress, that would “accelerate” reviews of current detainees and consider alternative locations to house them — though he didn’t mention specifics.
“We are outlining what options look like,” he said.
U.S. officials say the plan considers, but does not name, 13 different locations in the U.S., including seven existing prison facilities in Colorado, South Carolina and Kansas, as well as six other locations on current military bases. They say the plan doesn’t recommend a preferred site and the cost estimates are meant to provide a starting point for a conversation with Congress. The seven facilities reviewed by a Pentagon assessment team last year were: the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks and Midwest Joint Regional Corrections Facility at Leavenworth, Kansas; the Consolidated Naval Brig, Charleston, South Carolina; the Federal Correctional Complex, which includes the medium, maximum and supermax facilities in Florence, Colorado; and the Colorado State Penitentiary II in Canon City, Colorado, also known as the Centennial Correctional Facility. … Members of Congress have been demanding the Guantanamo plan for months, and those representing South Carolina, Kansas and Colorado have voiced opposition to housing the detainees in their states.
Current law bans the administration from moving Guantanamo detainees to the United States.
Let’s begin with the conclusion: Barack Obama is releasing dangerous terrorists against the recommendations of military and intelligence professionals, he’s doing so at a time when the threat level from radical Islamists is elevated, and he is lying about it. He is lying about how many jihadists he has released and lying about their backgrounds, all part of his effort to empty the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. We write this knowing the accusation is a strong one and that the word lying will offend the sensibilities of the establishment media. There is an unwritten rule that requires euphemizing lies with gentler descriptions, especially when talking about the president of the United States. There is a veritable thesaurus of verbal politeness one can deploy: deceiving, dissembling, misleading, prevaricating, being duplicitous, evasive, fallacious, mendacious, dishonest, disingenuous, specious, spurious, untruthful. Not this time. The president is lying.
